German Chancellor Angela Merkel: 'The only thing I can say now is that I'm in deep shock about the plane crash and the death of the Polish president.'

U.S. President Barack Obama: 'Devastating to Poland, to the United States, and to the world. President Lech Kaczynski was a distinguished statesman who played a key role in the Solidarity movement, and he was widely admired in the United States as a leader dedicated to advancing freedom and human dignity.'

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi: 'I was a personal friend of President Lech Kaczynski. This a grave moment of mourning for a friendly country and Italy joins in the mourning with all its heart.'

..most of the kingpin interviewers [Larry King, Charlie Rose, David Letterman and Barbara Walters] in the mainstream media were astonishingly up front about saying they would not help Kitty promote her book [an Oprah bio] because they didn’t want to offend Oprah! They didn’t even make up excuses; they flat-out said they didn’t want to offend Oprah.

I could go with the "I've heard it both ways" excuse, but the fact is (as I'm sure you can tell from reading my comments), I'm just terrible with letters. (I don't really "see" them when I read.) I had always interpreted that phrase as meaning the person has a right to speak in peace, as in, someone shouldn't take it away from them.

@lyssa, two things that work for me are (1) let it sit for 24 to 48 hours and then read it again, and (2) have someone whom you trust proofread it for typos, grammatical errors, wrong word (it's vs. its, their vs they're vs there, wear vs where vs were), etc., but not for content.

I got that first one from reading Moss Hart's autobiography Act One. I got the second suggestion from hard experience.

Sigh. I wish I was so blessed from the other side. I sometimes edit the (English) work of Hong Kong locals, and it is frequently a bane. Their sentence structure requires me to work out what they are trying to say.

(Even if it is clear and the ideas are brilliant, I have qualms about editing their phrases to produce declarative sentences when the original contains almost none--especially with academic work.)